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Gest Fellow Kathryn Falvo is a Ph.D. student in History at Penn State University. Her project is entitled “Spurning the Protection of Man: Quaker Women and Travel in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.”

Katie Falvo 2013 Gest Fellow

I’ve spent this last month at Haverford researching the lives of traveling Quaker women, who ventured beyond their communities, states, and even continents to participate in the wider Quaker world of the 18th and 19th centuries. Although the original project was to simply understand Quaker women’s motivations, my time at Haverford has showed me how complex this particular kind of traveling is. With the information gained here (and with future visits to Philadelphia) I hope to round out my thoughts for a full dissertation on the topic.

Unlike other Christian women who travel for their faith, Quaker women (particularly in these early years) were rarely evangelistic. Their movements read like a catalogue of social calls, moving from small meetinghouse to the dwellings of various Friends. Traveling Quakers take vigil over the sick, participate in local social affairs, and have religious conversations with small gatherings of Friends. In short, they participate in the domestic life of the places they visit. Rather than visiting strangers in an attempt at conversion, these women visit known Quaker strongholds to strengthen an already existing fellowship. Through these visitations, they maintain a socially and politically close knit community – even across the Atlantic and through years of national and international warfare.

As I am finding out though, travel meant different things to this community as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth. In the 18th century, religious visits called to the tradition of the “Valiant Sixty,” the original Quakers who were sent out with a biblical mission to spread and strengthen the Quaker faith. The goal of the Valiant Sixty was to visit rural areas to strengthen small Quaker communities, and bound together a wider church with love and fellowship. Eighteenth century travelers, both male and female, (literally) followed in these footsteps. They established a mapped network of travel routes, lodging contacts, and small meetings, and created a cohesiveness to the faith. As the century turned, however, various larger social changes altered the significance of this travel. Traditional gender roles changed as the market economy changed, placing more demanding domestic expectations on women and keeping them at home more frequently. As marriage ideals changed, some women became more hesitant to leave their husbands for long periods of time. Similarly, relationships between parents and children changed, and leaving children for extended travels was considered far more irresponsible than it had been a few decades earlier. Changing technologies (like railroads) and the emergence of travel as a leisure activity altered the ways that women moved and the financial responsibility of the church and ministers.

At the same time that their opportunities were limited, though, women found the traditional networks laid by earlier Quakers to be a useful tool for the political endeavors of the 19th century. As antislavery picked up steam and the Grimké sisters propelled the feminist movement into action, travel became politicized in a way that it had not necessarily been before. In this sense, travel was a traditional of the Quaker faith that helped propel women into political action and can help explain (alongside the liberal policies of the faith more generally) why some of the biggest names in feminist history – like Lucretia Mott and Angelina and Sarah Grimké – came from the Quaker faith.

I spent my month here pouring over manuscripts left by various female travelers. The best access to their thoughts and experiences is through their journals, which document their religious and worldly experiences. Fortunately many of these were published and are now housed in Haverford’s rare book collection. Others found their way into Friends Miscellany or other Friends’ journals. By printing and publicizing them, the Quaker community showed its support for female travelers and the importance of the religious/social work they achieved. However, it also shows the biases of this community. Published journals are usually only from women who traveled abroad, and are highly politicized. Less printed journals exist after the turn of the 19th century. Haverford also houses many of the unpublished diaries of traveling women – women like Ann Shipley, for example, who traveled through the Southern United States thirty years before the Civil War, and remarks upon the horror of seeing slavery firsthand. I was also able to make use of an extensive letter collection, detailing the communications of women with one another while abroad and reading the advice passed from generation to generation about travel. Some women kept detailed accounts of their routes and the miles they traveled – a number-focused booklet that sheds new light on the meaning of distance and religious devotion.

While here I received fabulous insights from the archivists, historians, and librarians at Haverford. Walter Hjelt Sullivan pointed out to me the original religious importance of travel for the early Quaker church, which had previously been too far out of my radar. Margaret Schaus led me to consider the meaning of calculated pilgrimage in different areas, opening up my thought process to other eras and demographics. Susan M. Stuard showed me valuable student work on Charity Cook, a rather elusive (though crucial) traveler in the 19th century. Emma Lapsansky-Werner pushed me to consider the meaning of “community” in various eras, and challenged me to think about the particular family circumstances of women on the road. John Anderies pointed me to a substantial map collection, a necessary visualization of the routes Quakers took, and helpful for understanding the movements of various women as meetings emerged and dissipated in different eras. Ann Upton showed me the Friends’ Rules of Discipline, and pointed me towards a wealth of secondary and published material. Diana Peterson aided me with some of the more difficult biographical work, hunted manuscripts down for me, and even traced a few slang words from the 19th century when we were stumped with Quakers’ writing. I can’t express enough gratitude for the work of these excellent historians. I have been extraordinarily grateful for such a wonderful opportunity.

Gest Fellow Michael Cohen is Assistant Professor of English at the UCLA. His project is entitled “Poetry, Abolition, and a Circle of Friends.”

I spent my month as a Gest Fellow working on a project on nineteenth-century poetry, The Social Lives of Poems. In essence, this project seeks to understand how people used poems in a variety of different contexts and projects, from large-scale efforts to imagine shared histories, to political endeavors like antislavery, to more personal situations such as developing pietistic practices or maintaining relationships with others. Poems were the most popular form of literature in nineteenth-century America, and (unlike novels, sermons, and other widespread forms) a great many readers of poems also wrote them. “Writing” poems actually entails a range of different practices: recording original poetry; participating in collaborative efforts and games with others; and copying or transcribing verses from books, newspapers, and other printed sources.

At the center of my research this month was a two-volume book that combines these different forms of verse-writing. Entitled “Fragments from the unpublished writings of John Greenleaf Whittier,” and “Whittier Leaves,” these volumes are comprised of hand-written transcriptions of poems by the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The book was primarily the work of two women, Elizabeth Nicholson and Elizabeth Lloyd, who became friends with Whittier and his sister Elizabeth Hussey Whittier when they lived in Philadelphia between 1838-1840. Nicholson and Lloyd were both abolitionists and poets as well, and they formed the center of a group of friends (who were also Friends) who met regularly to socialize, talk, discuss politics and religion, and compose poetry. Sometime around 1839 they began collecting and transcribing Whittier’s verses. At the time, Whittier was a well-known abolitionist author, but he was not nationally renowned, and had not yet published a book of poems under his own name. Nicholson and Lloyd collected his poems as they were published piecemeal and scattershot in northeastern newspapers over the 1830s and 1840s.

These books are the most gorgeous manuscript books I’ve ever seen from the nineteenth century. The labor that went in to them (careful transcription, hand-drawn illustrations, manuscript effects such as black letter font, and so on) demonstrates the sheer pleasure that these friends took in copying, quoting, and circulating poems. The work was a collaborative venture, in which Nicholson and Lloyd recruited many other friends to participate. People would send them copies of Whittier’s poems, or contribute illustrations or other materials to the book. Nicholson would ask Whittier to contribute new work to “his” collection, which was not really his or by him. As the project grew, the books began to circulate among friends, who would copy from it into their own commonplace books. On occasion, Whittier requested it for his own records–it was more complete than any other volume of his work, and had poems that he himself no longer possessed! (Much of the poetry included in it did not appear in the collected writings of Whittier published in the 1890s, so to date it is arguably more complete than any other collection of his early work). Nicholson did not always know where the books were; through reading the friends’ letters, I’ve tracked this book as far away as New Hampshire.

For me, these books help to materialize and make manifest how poems could contribute to social, historical relationships. I spent a good deal of time in the library learning about the different people who contributed to the volume, reading letters and diaries and searching for clues and connections among these different people, almost all of whom have left behind poems of their own (a cache of letters from Elizabeth Whittier to Elizabeth Nicholson was especially great in this regard). Yet, this book also shows me that people could claim ownership over poems they had not originally authored: copying and transcribing poems clearly had value for people that was productive rather than simply re-productive.

The Quaker Collection at Haverford College has a wonderfully rich collection of manuscript poetry. Some of it is by published authors, but most of it is by ordinary people who had no ambition or desire for literary fame. People wrote down poems in letters, diaries, notebooks, and commonplace books. People also used these sources to record what they were reading and, occasionally, what they thought of it. Not surprisingly, a great deal of this manuscript poetry is pietistic and develops conventions of Protestant hymnody that would have been quite familiar to most people. The poetry is conventional in a strong sense: familiar conventions (a regular rhyme and metrical pattern; standard images and forms of language, often adopted from scripture) made poetry an accessible form of expression, and helped readers develop a sense of agency and relation to their language. Composing hymns or poems of devout expression therefore helped people understand their spiritual life.

While this sort of devotional poetry is common throughout the collections, many people wrote satirical, impromptu comic verses to their friends, often about other friends or local events, scandals, and controversies. The huge collection of the Allinson family, for instance, especially the letters and papers of William James Allinson, his wife Rebecca, and brother Samuel, is rich with this sort of verse, which names names and delights in wordplay, puns, and triple (even occasionally quadruple) rhymes. The recently-acquired Potts family papers is another treasure trove of poems. Young Mary Potts, whose diaries make up the bulk of the collection, was an avid reader and diarist. Her commonplace books are full of poems, original and copied, while her diaries detail what she read, who she read with, and what she was doing (for instance, she attended the meeting of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women at Pennsylvania Hall, the day before it was burned down by a mob). Her papers reveal an enchanting record of one woman’s intellectual, social, and literary life.

It was a pleasure reading through materials like Mary Potts’ (she also had neat, albeit small, handwriting), and I’ve learned a great deal from my time at Haverford. I’d especially like to thank the wonderful staff in the Special Collections library for all their help and support: John Anderies, Diane Peterson, and Ann Upton.

Gest Fellow Jonathan D. Sassi is Professor of History at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His project is entitled “Toward Gradual Emancipation in New Jersey.”

I am studying the political struggle that eventuated in New Jersey’s gradual emancipation act of 1804. New Jersey was the last state to pass such a law during the period of “the first emancipation” that followed the American Revolution, with Pennsylvania having been the first in 1780. New Jersey’s gradual emancipation statute was the result of a decades-long campaign by antislavery activists, many of whom were Quakers. I have been trying to learn how the eighteenth-century antislavery movement functioned: how it fashioned winning arguments and rebutted the opposition’s; mobilized supporters and built coalitions; went to court and won legislative victories; all with the ultimate goal of uprooting an entrenched institution and liberating people held in bondage.

The Quaker Collection holds a rich variety of primary source materials that illuminate various facets of the struggle against slavery. To cite a few examples, the correspondence of several key individuals along with the records of abolition societies reveal the inner workings of the movement. The minutes of various Quaker meetings also provide insight into the drive to eliminate slavery, both within the Society of Friends and in society at large. Manumission certificates and legal depositions open up fascinating stories about how particular men, women, and children escaped the snares of enslavement. Moreover, I discovered that the Quaker Collection also contains unexpected finds. For example, a wedding certificate or business receipt — documents that on the surface seemingly have nothing to do with the antislavery movement — can lay bare the personal ties that connected several of the major historical actors and bring their eighteenth-century world into focus.

My research will require me to visit a number of other archives in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. The full tapestry of New Jersey’s antislavery campaign will only become visible as I reconnect the scattered strands of evidence. My time at the Quaker Collection has been enormously productive and provided me with an abundance of findings and leads for further investigation. I am grateful to have been awarded a Gest Fellowship and to the library’s expert staff for their manifold assistance.

October 8, 4:30 p.m., Special Collections, Magill Library, Haverford College: “The Other Family Living with the Woolmans: African-Americans and Quakers Living Together, and the Process of Gradual Emancipation”

After finishing up with meeting house photographs, postcards, etc., I moved on to glass slides featuring images of Quaker meeting houses. So the problem was, how exactly does one scan glass slides? Well, luckily some of the scanners here in Special Collections are equipped to scan glass slides. So I put the slide on the scanner, set it to the right setting pressed scan, and hoped for the best. Unfortunately, the scanner did not recognize that there was anything there to be scanned. Oops. So I asked more knowledgeable people than I am, and found that I needed a plastic slide holder to make it work. The next problem was that there were no slide holders that fit the glass slides with which I was working. That’s when improvising seemed to be the only option. I used a guide that fit the scanner I was using, flipped the glass slides vertically (even though the guide was oriented horizontally) and tried scanning again. The results were not so great (see below).

So, it’s pretty and colorful, but it certainly is not an image of a meeting house. I’m still not entirely sure what I did wrong here, but eventually I was able to get scans like the ones below…

Abington Friends Meeting House, Jenkintown, PA, 1836

Atlantic City Meeting House, Atlantic City, NJ, 1872

Everything went well with the scanning of these 3 in. by 4 in. slides (the smallest of the glass slides in the collection). New problems arose when it came time to scan the 5 in. by 7 in. slides. The scanner I used could only scan slides that fit between a 3.25 in. by 10.5 in. area (a very long and narrow rectangle). The new slides’ dimensions exceeded this constraint.

So the project hit a brick wall for a time until a scanner with the correct settings and equipment to scan the larger glass slides could be found. The new scanner was much easier to use because no guide was needed to scan the glass slides. I used this particular scanner for the larger 6.5 in. by 8.5 in. slides as well.

Gest Fellow Ben Wright is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History at Rice University. His research is on “American Clergy and the Problem of Slavery, 1750-1830: Form the Politics of Conversion to the Conversion to Politics.”

Ben Wright 2012 Gest Fellow

My research explores the connections between religious conversion and antislavery activism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Cutting off at 1830, when antislavery hardened into immediate abolitionism, I argue that the Americans and Britons who attacked slavery in this early period, did so primarily out of broader motives than simply a hatred of human bondage. The push to convert the colonies, the new American republic, and eventually the world trumped nearly every other ambition for the growing population of evangelical Protestants in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Quakers, however, offer a powerful counter-example. My study argues that Quakers demonstrated an unrivaled commitment to antislavery because of their inward quest for communal purity. It is no coincidence that the Quaker antislavery crusade coincided with what Jack Marietta has called the Quaker Reformation, a mid-eighteenth century renewal movement among Friends to refocus religious life around the principles of modesty, anti-materialism, and communal discipline.

While working in the Quaker Collection, I have investigated the letters, diaries, and other private writings of dozens of Quaker reformers, the minutes of numerous monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings, and the antislavery publications of numerous Quaker societies. My research has confirmed many of my suspicions, while also revealing several surprising new insights. The writings of early to mid-eighteenth century Quakers like John Fothergill, George Churchman, John Pemberton and others illustrate my arguments regarding Quaker anxieties by revealing a great preoccupation with internal purity and a fear that moral failures among Friends will lead a winnowing of the faithful. I was surprised, however, to find seeds of dissention among mid-to-late eighteenth-century Quakers that would later sprout into the antebellum schisms. I found that reformers were very much aware of these dissentions and used antislavery as a tool to maintain unity. The private letters of several Quaker reformers reveal their relief at the refreshing unity among Friends in the antislavery cause. Another surprise came from a close reading of Quaker conversion narratives. Conversion in the early eighteenth century was a deeply fraught process that often took months if not years, whereas by the end of the century, conversion was a quicker process. In the early nineteenth century, the language of conversion almost completely drops out of Quaker memorials.

It will take more time to integrate these findings within my larger analysis, yet I am grateful to say that the remarkably helpful staff and impressive holdings of the Quaker Collection have given me a treasure trove of evidence to inform my project.

Welcome class of 2016, and all others who may stumble upon this post! My name is Karl Moll, and I am a rising Junior who works as the Archivist’s Assistant in the Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections in the Library, which houses the College Archives (and a great place to look for a job once you get to campus!). I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what incoming freshman at Haverford were experiencing 100 years ago when they came to campus. Now, the ‘Ford has undergone a lot of changes in the last century: for starters, we are no longer an all-male school, the class size was about 1/10th the size it is now (167 students at the school, 48 of them freshman), the Morris Infirmary was still under construction, and the college was officially Quaker.

When freshmen entered the college, they were given a handbook:
This book was designed to introduce the new students to the customs of the college, and was funded by the Y.M.C.A. (which was still very much the Young Men’s Christian Association). The main goal in publishing the guide was to “call…attention to an organized effort for the development of Christian character amongst us”. Though, since this is Haverford, the organization “lays no emphasis on creeds or dogmas, and in no way tries to exert sectarian influence”. To me this sounds reminiscent of the second part of the oft-quoted segment of the 1888 Commencement Speech by President Isaac Sharpless:

Every time I read this, I get chills

It seems to fit into the tradition of being one’s own person.

One of the more interesting sections of any of the class handbooks from years past are the Rules for Freshman. Unfortunately, 1912-1913 seems to have been a reasonable year, and there are only “Points for Freshman”. Most of these are still pretty sound advice, though many are outdated:

Some useful information for incoming freshman, plus advice

In other years, there are rules banning freshmen wearing mustaches and carrying canes. Freshmen were also required to move out of paths to make way for upperclassmen, and not lighting an upperclassmen’s cigarette could lead to a fine. Maybe this year the Officer of Hazing (yes, that was an actual title) decided to take it easy. The sophomores were traditionally in charge of Hazing (or teaching the school’s customs). To see some funny rules from earlier years check here or here (feel free to browse around the site that the link brings you to, these are the digitized images from Haverford Special Collections and the Archives of the College!).

One of my favorite parts of historical Haverfordiana are the songs that freshman were expected to learn and sing at sporting events (failure to learn the songs resulted in punishments which ranged from midnight head shavings to monetary fines to being thrown in the duckpond). The major sporting events on campus were soccer and football (“Undefeated Since 1972″), but many of the songs could be sung during alumni events, or seniors could just make the underclassmen sing in the dining hall if they felt like it:

Various publications on campus and College Songs

I wish we still had songs like these...

More Songs!

The rest of the handbook provided the new student with reference material to all the resources on campus. These range from train schedules, telephone and telegraph services, the various clubs on campus, student publications, secret societies, and more…

A listing of trains to and from Philly. Clearly they didn’t have the SEPTA app…

To let the freshman know what they were up against

Sure, none of these exist anymore…

Before we had these fancy “cellular phones”…

Customs and the “Honor System”:

College Customs and the Honor System

The Honor Code of today seems very similar to the Honor System of old, but at the same time very different. And while we still have a “Customs” period for Freshman like in the post above, it is far removed from what these old newspapers show us:

So a lot has changed over the years, but there is still that Haverfordian feel through it all

If you have any questions about this, or other aspects of Haverford History, feel free to shoot me an email at kmoll@haverford.edu, or email Haverford Special Collections (hc-special@haverford.edu) where you can get some more expert advice. If I were writing “Points for Freshman” for the incoming class of 2016, one that I would stress would be to stop in and visit Special Collections in the back of the Library. The collection is really one of the gems of the college. You can find the historical materials for the club you get involved in, genealogical records of famous Quakers, old sports photos, anti-slavery materials, maps, yearbooks from years past, rare books (Copernicus, Darwin, Shakespeare… no big deal), records for the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and much more.

On June 29, 2012, the National Museum of American Jewish History on Independence Mall in Philadelphia opened an exhibition called “To Bigotry No Sanction: George Washington & Religious Freedom.” Included in the exhibition are letters from 1789 between George Washington and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which are part of PYM records here at Haverford. The exhibit will run through September 30, 2012.

Federal Hall in New York is likely where the meeting took place (image from The New York Public Library)

The letter to President Washington was composed on October 2, 1789 by a group of nineteen Quakers led by George Churchman and approved the next day during the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The meeting then selected a group of six Friends who “proceeded to New York” and, joined by a delegation from the New York Meeting for Sufferings, the path was cleared “for their personal attendance on the President” during which time “the address was read by one of the number, and [...] they were respectfully received.” Meeting records indicate that the delegation presented a copy of Robert Barclay’s Apology, the famous scholarly defence of Quaker practices, to Washington during the visit. Washington’s response, while critical of Quaker practice in some regards, was generally positive. News of the meeting spread quickly and on November 4, 1789, one Susanna Dillwyn reported in a letter to her father that Washington read his reply himself instead of leaving the task to his secretaries so that “he gains the esteem of everybody—those who agree in few other things all unite in admiring General Washington”(Dillwyn and Emlen family correspondence, Library Company of Philadelphia).

Washington from around the time the meeting occurred (image from Bryn Mawr College Collections).

The meeting with Washington followed the English Quaker tradition of making similar presentations upon the coronation of a new monarch. However, this letter had particular significance given Washington’s rocky history with the Friends. Washington’s first encounter with Quakers occurred as a young officer in Virginia when he faced the problem of what to do with six Friends who were among his conscripted men but refused to fight, work, or do anything to support the army. Though he treated them leniently, Washington resented the Quakers’ refusal to help with common defense. Washington’s distrust continued during the Revolution, as he believed the Quakers’ refusal to fight with the colonists stemmed from political sympathy for the British, and consequently he refused Quaker relief parties passage through colonist lines on a number of occasions. Still, Washington treated Friends with respect including entertaining a group of Quaker ladies, who had come to petition for the release of seventeen Quaker leaders, over dinner.

Washington became more friendly to the Quakers after coming to understand that the Friends’ pacifism stemmed from religious feelings not political leanings. Indeed one of his most trusted generals was the former Quaker Nathanael Greene. Given this history, the most explosive statement in the Friends’ letter is “As we desire to be filled with fervent charity for those who differ from us in faith and practice [...] we can take no part in carrying on war on any occasion, or under any power.” The duality of Washington’s feelings on this issue and for the Quakers in general comes through in his response, as he says of the Quakers that “except their declining to share with others the burthen of the common defence, there is no denomination among us, who are more exemplary and useful citizens.” Washington believed that religion was valuable because it supported good citizenship, so, while Washington respected their freedom of belief, he rebuked Quaker practice for making for less useful citizens. Still, given their history of persecution, receiving Washington’s respect for their beliefs and the freedom of conscience must have been a remarkable moment for Quakers.

Anyone curious about these materials can contact Thomas Littrell (tlittrel@haverford.edu) for more information.

As part of a series of posts by our student employees, Karl Moll ’14 talks about what he’s been working on in Special Collections this summer:

One of the bigger projects that I’ve been working on this summer has been to create a template which allows users to input archival information from a finding aid into Excel and then it converts it into a valid EAD program so that it can be uploaded into Archivists’ Toolkit.

If you don’t understand what the above section means, that’s all right. It took me a little bit to get it all, and I’m going to walk you through it now.

EAD is subset of XML which is a programming language which is pretty similar to HTML, without most of the style commands. XML is really useful in creating hierarchies of information, which is why EAD (Encoded Archival Description) is based on this format. EAD is a standard used by many archives and special collections across the country to make finding materials easier across collections. For more on the history of EAD, look here. For more on standards in general, I may write another blog post about the development of ANSI standards. But more on that later.

For this project, I’m working on a brilliant template by Matt Herbison which properly formats the information that is inputted into a spreadsheet into a valid EAD program so that it can be uploaded into Archivist’s Toolkit. It is a really wonderful template that makes converting a finding aid into AT so much easier than writing the code by hand, or even entering it directly into AT. However, to be super useful to us here, I’ve been trying to make some modifications to it.

The first thing I did was get rid of a lot of the fields that we wouldn’t be using for our finding aids. After a lot of consultation with John and Diana, we determined that all we really needed were Level, Title, and the newly added Call Number or Shelf Location. More on the Call Number in a bit. The template went from looking like this:

To this:

This new version is a lot more streamlined for what we need it to do, since that’s all the information that we are really interested in anyways. Since there wasn’t already a field for Call Number, I had to create one. This part of the project ended up taking some time getting familiar with XML and EAD.

I really wanted there to be a way to put the call number with each individual item in the Finding Aid. The way I first tried was just to concatenate the Title cell in Excel with a Call Number cell, so that it would look like “Karl’s Papers, 2010-2012. Call Number: R1 SA B3″ but this lacked a symmetry when it actually created the finding aid, since not all the titles are the same length. I was looking through the AT window…

…when I noticed that there was this field:

Now, a Component Unique Identifier sounds a lot like a Call Number to me, so I then began an Internet quest to learn more about XML and EAD to see what tags corresponded to this entry field (I knew that there HAD to be something, since AT fields correspond to the EAD standard). After a couple of days of teaching myself about XML, I realized that the tag <unitid> </unitid> would be my best bet.

Now, the template works by concatenating cells in the spreadsheet so that the code is automatically produced. In the back-end of the program, it looks like this:

Notice that some of the columns have fixed values such as “<c0″ and “><did><unittitle>”. These are here to create certain constants for a valid program, and it ends up producing code like this:

I changed some of the fixed cells so that they would populate the Component Unique Identifier field in Archivists Toolkit using the <unitid> tag so that it produced code like this (the differences are pretty subtle):

So after I made those changes, Archivists Toolkit was able to accept it as a valid program to be uploaded, with a call number for every field and then produce a Finding Aid like this:

The Call Number is on the left side preceding the Title. I’ve been working on various ways of making the Call Number more readable, but haven’t uploaded it to AT yet.

My next blog post on the templates will be on my ongoing struggles to deal with nesting issues to provide the user with one extra level of hierarchy!!! Stay tuned!

This past week we were visited by two scholars from the Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament (THEOT) project. Made up of scholars from around the world, THEOT’s director Steve Delamarter and his assistant Jeremy Brown, both from George Fox University, spent a day examining and digitizing our Ethiopic manuscripts from the J. Rendel Harris Collection.

Steve Delamarter examines a small Ethiopic codex

The goal of the THEOT project is to reconstruct the textual history of the Ethiopic Old Testament by sampling passages from each book of the bible from a couple dozen important manuscripts from around the world. While one particular manuscript at Haverford was of great interest to the project team, they were kind enough to digitize all six of our Ethiopic texts.

Steve and Jeremy began their day by setting up their digitization equipment in the library’s group study room. They came loaded down with laptops, cameras, camera stands and tripods, and got to work imaging the manuscripts and creating quire maps of the page signatures. Taking the better part of the day to get through all six manuscripts, they imaged the works from cover to cover (including, of course, the covers), shot additional close-ups of important details, and analyzed the foliation of each manuscript by creating “quire maps.” The resulting digital files, such as these images of a prayers and hymns manuscript (RH 23a), will be a great boon to our faculty and students, as well as to scholars from afar.

Steve Delamarter examines a 14th-century Samaratin Pentateuch

At the end of the day while the images were being processed on their computers we were able to show them a few other gems from the J. Rendel Harris Collection, including a rare 14th-century Samaritan Pentateuch. We’re grateful to Steve and Jeremy for making time in their schedule to visit and work with our manuscripts. This type of cooperative work in collections digitization is a win-win for all involved!